The Hive - Kew Gardens - London, Great Britain.
N 51° 29.020 W 000° 17.513
30U E 688029 N 5707090
The Hive is an abstract sculpture, over 60 feet tall, lattice of octagonal shapes. Fitted with thousands of LED lights that glow and fade as a unique soundtrack hums & buzzes around you. Located in Kew Botanical Gardens, London.
Waymark Code: WMRFD5
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 06/18/2016
Views: 5
The Hive at Kew Gardens. An open-air structure standing at 60 feet tall made from 170,000 pieces of aluminium & weighing over 80,000 pounds. The Hive encapsulates the story of the honeybee and the important role of pollination in feeding the planet. Explore the hive through an immersive light & sound experience, as you hear music created by the bees.
“My approach to a sculpture seeks to frame nature so one can experience it more intimately,” says British artist Wolfgang Buttress, whose 17-metre high Hive installation opens at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London on Saturday. “I want visitors to feel enveloped, wrapped-up and involved in the experience, rather than adopting the position of an external observer.
Its 170,000 pieces of aluminium, suspended from the ground, appear as a twisting swarm of bees from afar, but as you come closer it becomes a hive-like structure of latticework whose low humming sound and hundreds of flickering LED lights draws you in to a multi-sensory instillation. The intensity of sound and light is controlled by the vibrations of honeybees in an actual hive at Kew that is connected to the sculpture.
Honeybees communicate primarily with each other through vibrations. By biting a wooden stick connected to a conductor, visitors to the Hive can get a sense of four types of vibrational messages through the bones in their head. These include the tooting and quacking signals that virgin queen bees make when they challenge each other in a display of strength to determine who will be the queen of the hive; begging, when a bee requests food from another another; and the waggle dance which communicates the location of a good food source. Text Source: (
visit link) & (
visit link)